Roblox has discontinued Connect, its video-calling feature, ending a service that let users appear as their customized avatars during calls, the company confirmed.
Connect, which had launched in late 2023, was an unusual take on video chat: instead of showing users' faces, it animated their Roblox avatars in real time using the camera, letting friends "hang out" together in virtual spaces during a call. Roblox gave developers about a month's notice before switching off the underlying tools, meaning any in-game features built on Connect stopped working.
A product decision, the company says
Roblox has framed the shutdown as a straightforward matter of usage. The company said that players aged 13 and over had "predominantly" chosen its voice-only calling feature, Party Voice, over Connect, and that the voice service was better suited to how people actually use the platform. Party Voice, which limits calls to trusted friends and ties access to age checks, is now Roblox's main supported way to make private calls.
Against a backdrop of safety pressure
The change lands at a fraught moment for Roblox. The platform is used by huge numbers of children, and it has faced sustained criticism, lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny over how well it protects them from grooming and other harms. In response, the company has been rolling out tighter safeguards, including technology that estimates a user's age and rules that restrict or disable chat for younger users unless a parent allows it.
Roblox did not present Connect's closure as a safety measure, attributing it to low take-up. But the decision fits a broader pattern in which the company has been paring back or locking down open-ended social features that are harder to moderate, while steering users toward more controlled alternatives. Child-safety advocates have argued that design changes of this kind, however welcome, are only part of the answer, and that technology alone cannot substitute for robust moderation and parental oversight.
For the platform, retiring a little-used video feature is a low-cost way to simplify its social tools and reduce a potential avenue for misuse at once. For its millions of young users, it means one more way of connecting on Roblox has quietly disappeared, folded into the safer, plainer options the company now prefers to offer.
